Contextual Art and Hedonic Price Indexes: To Be or Not to Be Marketable?Belén Mazuecos (Univ. Granada) et Marilena Vecco (Ca’ Foscari, Venise)

3 décembre 2008

(Journée "De la sociologie à l’histoire de l’art", session "Marchés, prix et valeurs")
The aim of this paper is to measure the market success of a group of artists, part of the movement called Contextual Art (CA). They represent a paradigm of critique against the commercial aspects of art (mechanisms of circulation, diffusion and selection), the concept of author, the notion of authenticity and the collecting. The strategies developed by these artists against the art business and its institutions will be also analysed.
We try to understand if this kind of art has a market and its dimension. Our hypothesis is that even if these artists criticise hardly the market, they are submitted to its laws: the more revolutionary the artist actions, the more
acquiescent the contexts of intermediation as the market of art neutralizes the artist’s critique and incorporates it. We analyse this “trick game” (José Luis Brea, 2004) and its impact on the market.
The methodology used is base on the hedonic regression method in order to find out the price index of the movement Contextual Art (Pre War, Post War, and Actual Art) and its sub-movements (Dadaism, Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, Body Art, Conceptual Art, Land Art, Fluxus, YBA, etc.) on the base of 5005 works belonging to a sample of 52 CA artists, sold at art actions between 1990
and 2007.